The discipline ledger.
Four cadence rituals govern this codebase. They run on a clock, enforced by CI. Their entries are append-only, never deleted, and published as written.
Most companies say they have a quality process. This page is the process — public, dated, every entry retrievable. Drift would show up here first.
Quality Council
every 3 days · activation: Quality Council
A 30-minute synthesis review pulling the ratchet movements, top user-reported issues, top internal regressions, and a forward-looking question that prevents drift into "we always measure these things."
### Cycle summary 27 builds since the last Quality Council (B1399 → B1525). Two distinct phases: **Phase 1 (B1499-B1521): the 20-item Punch List sprint.** ALL 20 items shipped. The Standards moat went from "claim" to "signed receipt" — Human Contribution Log shipped end-to-end
Trust Decay Audit
every 14 days · activation: Trust Decay Audit
Walks every public claim (homepage, /scoring/standard, /the-receipts, reproducibility seal) against verified implementation facts. Catches drift between what the site says and what the code does before users do.
### Drift patterns surfaced this session (3) This entry documents three distinct trust-decay failure modes caught during the B1660-B1669 burst. Each is closed; each spawned new CI infrastructure to prevent recurrence. #### Pattern 1: documentation drift through stale auto-state markers **Detected:** B1660 (Deep Audit Tier-1 #10).
Bet Reviews
every 45 days · activation: Bet Review
Lists 5 builds shipped 45 days ago, marks each as moved-the-metric / didn't / killed. The retrospective discipline — pruning what didn't work is harder than shipping what does.
This is the inaugural Bet Review. The window covers the audit-execution session (B1296-B1312) — 17 audit steps + 5 KILL-list closes + 10 strategic priorities + 6 builds installing the 3-year-plan operating system. Most bets are too fresh to truly evaluate, but the principle is to NEVER skip a review window — even a partial review establishes the cadence. ### Bets reviewed (5 most consequential)
External Audit Prep
every 45 days · activation: External Audit Prep
Generates the brief for the next external reviewer trio (engineer / songwriter / AI safety researcher). The forcing function that keeps internal claims honest under outside scrutiny.
This is the brief that gets sent to the first three external reviewers once the operator identifies + recruits them. The brief itself is a ritual artifact: it forces us to write down the questions before we hear answers we can't unhear. ### Reviewers - **Engineer:** TBD — target: senior IC at a music-tech company (Splice, Output, LANDR, Native Instruments, or similar). Compensation: $500 + 60-min review every 45 days.
How "overdue" gets enforced
Every push runs npm run check:cadence-health. If any cadence is past its threshold (Quality Council > 7 days, Trust Decay > 22 days, Bet Review + External Audit > 60 days) the gate fails and the deploy blocks. Drift can't accumulate silently — the next push won't go out until the overdue ritual runs and an entry lands here.
That's what makes the discipline real. A ritual unenforced is a ritual that decays. The 22 CI ratchets in the codebase work the same way — every metric only moves down.